A while back, I saw the actor and comedian Jim Carrey on the Larry King Live TV show. One of the things he said stuck with me: “I believe that everything that happens to you is the greatest thing that could ever happen to you. Everything — because that is exactly how the universe works. It gives you whatever you are in alignment with, and it’s all designed to work on the weakest link you have.”

This type of profound insight only comes from observing life closely, and I believe it’s one of the most important insights a person could come to. Since life indeed seems to work this way, what, if anything, can we do to move things along so we aren’t stuck forever dealing with our “weakest links”?

The Secrets of Manifestation

In his classic book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill wrote about a secret that many successful people have discovered: People attract what they think about. In other words, we’re like magnets, constantly attracting opportunities, people, and situations to us. Or, to put it in the terms of an ancient principle: Like attracts like. You attract and become what you hold in your mind both consciously and subconsciously.

I often ask people, “What do you want out of life?” At first, this seems like an easy question to answer, but few people have really thought about it. So when I ask people, most pause and say something like, “I have to think about that, but I can tell you what I don’t want!” And that’s precisely the problem. People attract what they don’t want because they spend most of their time thinking about what they don’t want.

What Hill and others have called “the secret” is really not a new idea. Buddha once said, “All we are is a result of what we have thought.” This is another way of saying that we are the creators of our reality. In order to better understand how this really works, we need to consider not only what we think but also what beliefs we carry at the subconscious level and, even more important, what we feel.

Yes, our feelings provide important clues about what we hold in our subconscious mind — what we really believe, deep down. Our feelings are the force behind the manifestation process. So what we focus on with our thoughts and feelings is what we tend to attract and create in our experience. To put it in terms of the oft-quoted biblical verse Job 3:25: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”

When we realize that we draw to us what we fear, or what we focus on, it may at first seem like a negative scenario, but when we really grasp this fundamental process, it’s actually quite empowering. As Joseph Campbell puts it on the DVD The Hero’s Journey: “When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors and where there wouldn’t be a door for anybody else,...and the world moves in and helps.”

Rather than living with fear, if we can find a way to live with bliss, wonderful things open up for us. And bliss is readily available; it’s just that most people haven’t yet figured out how to feel blissful. Your bliss is not only a wonderful inner feeling that generates positive outcomes; it’s also a natural characteristic of your soul. Yes, your very own soul is always happy, so when you’re connected with your soul, you feel happy and often even blissful, and therefore your life is an experience of goodness.

When you’ve integrated the bliss, happiness, and goodness of your soul, you can easily manifest the wonderful results you want in your life because your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings have come into alignment and harmony with your true goals.

The Invisible Mirror

Here’s how the process works: Most people’s thoughts and feelings arise in response to their immediate experience. Since daily life is full of little challenges, such as bills to pay, meetings to attend, and issues to solve, people become preoccupied with solving problems rather than with thinking about or experiencing happiness and success. As a result, they create experiences to match their conscious and subconscious thoughts. Invariably, this leads them to experience even more challenges and disappointments.

If you want to know what you deeply believe, simply look at your life. It’s a reflection in a perfect but invisible mirror of the beliefs you hold at the deepest level. Your mirror turns out to be your friends, your relatives, your family, your work, your talents, your possessions, your capabilities, your opportunities — everything in your life.

We’ve all heard the proverb “You reap what you sow,” but most of us apply this concept only to negative situations. For example, we might say, “He wasted his life on gambling and alcohol, and now he’s reaping what he sowed.” But this proverb has a much broader application. It’s far more than a warning about extreme or terrible consequences. Rather, it’s a key to unlocking everything you could ever want.

The way this principle works is actually easy to understand: Life reflects what you hold at the deepest levels of your consciousness. This sounds simple, and maybe even obvious, but most people never think about it, and few live their lives as if it were really true. And yet, the very nature of life is that you get what you ask for!

This is why people of all faiths, praying to God by different names or no name at all, often have their prayers answered. If a call goes out with faith, belief, and the knowledge that God or the powers of the universe will answer, the sincerity, belief, conviction, and intention of the prayer cause a response according to the praying party’s faith and beliefs. This is the nature of how life works. This is the way everything works: The universe functions like a giant mirror, sending back to you what you project into it with your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings — and the past patterns you’ve established.

The reason people often don’t have what they want, or don’t get what they consciously claim to want, is that they have counter-programs running deep within them that broadcast the opposite intentions into the universe. The forces of your past feelings and beliefs put into motion the creative currents that orchestrate the circumstances of your life today. Whatever has been energized in the past will find ways to manifest in the present and future unless something is done to change what has been energized.

The Key to Change

When you finally realize that the universe reflects back to you what you’ve been holding in your consciousness at the deepest levels, your life will change. For one thing, if you really take in what this means, you’ll do some deep soul-searching to uncover how you’ve created your own reality. Once you see this, you can learn how to create other realities.

Being aware of the mirror universe also encourages you to become much more mindful throughout the day because you realize that you’re in the process of creation all the time. This is a crucial and profound understanding because it affects every single experience you have. This understanding reduces everything to a very basic process. If something in your life isn’t working the way you want, you don’t have to look outside yourself for the causes. This knowledge empowers you to create your life the way you want it to be. Can you see why this knowledge contains such tremendous power?

The universe contains all possibilities waiting to manifest, and it supports whatever you create through your inner beliefs and intentions. While many people continue to make excuses about why something isn’t working in their lives, many others are busy achieving success with very nearly the same tools and circumstances. The universe responds to expectation.

Let’s look at this a bit more deeply. Why are some successful, while others aren’t? The source of some people’s lack of success may not be immediately obvious. The subconscious messages being sent out to the universe may date back many years. Beliefs may be so old or deeply embedded that they seem to have no connection to current events. People may not believe they had anything to say about how they got where they are. They may think that they’re merely victims of circumstance or bad luck, or that they were simply dealt a bad hand or were born at the wrong time to the wrong parents. Many people have had these types of thoughts, even if they don’t express them.

Asking why you arrived where you are is important. Was it all blind chance, fate, or luck? It can be easy to think it was one of those forces, or to believe that you screwed up somewhere but now can’t remember when or how. Rather than blaming yourself or external forces, you can instead engage the conscious and unconscious sources within you and shift or release the beliefs and patterns held there to change your life experience. Your soul is your ideal partner for this endeavor.

The mirror universe is the perfect system of justice and balance. The old saying “What goes around comes around” reflects an observation that goes back thousands of years. If your life isn’t going the way you want, look inside; with the help of your soul, you can clear the patterns that aren’t working positively and establish new beliefs and patterns that will work.

Jonathan Parker is the author of The Soul Solution. He is a spiritual counselor with more than 30 years of experience teaching energy healing and enlightenment. The founder of Quantum Quests International, Inc., he is the creator of one of the largest libraries of personal growth audio recordings with over 10 million copies sold worldwide He lives in Oak View, CA. Visit him online at JonathanParker.org.